Papers, the PDF organizer for Mac OS X, has been updated to work with Leopard …

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Earlier this year, we reviewed a new application that still gets my vote for best app of the year, the PDF organizer Papers. Anyone who has spent much time in academia or research knows that PDF versions of journal articles have replaced the old photocopy, but keeping them organized can be a chore. Papers does for your PDFs what iTunes did for your MP3 collection; it organizes them, lets you view them, and makes it easy to find new ones.

At the time of release, it was a great app for those of us in biomedical science, since it used the NIH's PubMed search as its built-in search engine. That did limit the appeal somewhat, but at the time, the developers of the app (Mekentosj) promised support for more search engines that would open up the app's use to many more disciplines.

Then Leopard came out, and a few things under the hood needed fixing. But today, Papers 1.5 has been released, and it's not only Leopard-compatible; it now plays nice with scientists who don’t spend their days knee-deep in mice.

In addition to PubMed, you can now search with Google Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science, and more search engine plug-ins are due in the coming weeks. The application is a little more resource-hungry now, with the minimum recommended hardware being a 1.5GHz G4 Mac. Sadly, I'm still stuck in 1GHz land, but even so, the program remains usable.

So, there you have it. If you were waiting for support for fields other than biomedical to be added before trying it out, wait no longer!